First Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 28:16-20

Today’s scripture is known as the “great commission.”  Jesus commissions the disciples to “make disciples” of all nations.  How do they do that?  First they baptize them.  Then they teach them to obey Jesus commandments.  In the process, they are always in the presence of Jesus: 

“I am always with you.”

This seems so straightforward.  And it is.  And it’s not.

For centuries people have believed Jesus told the disciples to go make Christians of the whole world.  They traveled the lands they knew preaching about Jesus. Future popes conquered lands ruled by people of other religions because of this commission.  The great missionary movements of the 19th century were motivated by it.  People are still insisting that we must convert every person to Christianity because of this story.  But it’s not what it says.  It doesn’t say “make Christians.” It says “make disciples.”

Disciples and Christians aren’t the same thing.  The original disciples were Jews and stayed that way, thinking that the ministry of Jesus was a Jewish reform movement.  They had great debates about whether or not Jesus’ message was for gentiles or non-Jews.  We read about those debates when we read the book of Acts.  The followers of Jesus weren’t commonly called Christians until after the first disciples died.  This isn’t an instruction to make everyone in the world join the Christian church.

So what is a disciple?  I think of disciples as interns.  They follow the leader around, learn from the leader and act as assistants to the leader.  In this case it meant literally walking from town to town with Jesus and listening to what he said, both to the crowds and when they were together on the road or around the supper fire.  The disciples did crowd control and kept people from overwhelming Jesus.  They managed potlucks and food-shares so crowds could be fed.  They learned from Jesus how to heal people and were sent out on their own to heal and bring a message of hope, multiplying the number of villages Jesus could reach by dividing into pairs to cover more territory.

Along the way these disciples – the twelve men named in the Bible and the rest of the men and women who were traveling with them – learned from Jesus a new way of thinking about life.  There were just a few commandments – not the hundreds of traditional Jewish law:  love God, love your neighbor, love yourself.  When people wanted to debate intricacies of how the law applied to life, Jesus usually cut to the chase:  love.  What would love do?  Do that.  Rather than the usual looking-out-for-self way of living, these disciples were taught to look out for each other and for the crowds that gathered wherever they went.  They learned to share food.  They learned to heal illness.  They learned to offer wisdom without arguing and to move on when they weren’t welcome.  In a world where life was incredibly hard and economic and political injustice were everywhere, they learned to form communities and make life easier for everyone.  They became the kingdom of God – a vision for a better world.

Jesus tells them to keep doing more of what they’d already been doing together.  First they baptize folks – like John the Baptizer had baptized them.  Baptism was a ritual of joining on to a new vision for life.  It was a turning around point where you stopped living like you always had and started living in a new and more cooperative way.  You put others first.  You committed to love God and each other.  It was an intentional beginning of something new.

Once folks were baptized, they taught them how to live by the law of love.  When we read the Didache we learned that they taught them anger management so they wouldn’t get in trouble with other folks, particularly the Roman soldiers patrolling the towns.  They taught them simple rules of right and wrong that followed the law of love.  They taught them how to share their bread with travelers and how to set boundaries so they weren’t overwhelmed with requests.  They taught them how to be a community of equals even though they lived in vastly different circumstances – rich and poor, men and women, Jews and gentiles.

Over time being a follower of Jesus turned into being a Christian.  Being a Christian turned into believing particular things about Jesus – that he was God and he mostly cared about getting you into heaven.  That he died and was physically resurrected and that was the key to heaven.  Those may be good and helpful things.  But they’re not what Jesus taught the disciples or what he asked them to pass along.  We can keep all those ideas, but we can’t be true followers of Jesus if we don’t remember the beginning and learn to live in the way Jesus taught disciples to live.

How do we do that?

Well, some of you are healers.  You continue the ministry of healing disease and restoring people to wholeness.

Some are teachers.  You share knowledge and help people learn the skills they need to make a good life.

Some are policy wonks.  You figure out how we can work together to bring a better life to everyone.  Others just call legislators and remind them what bills you’d like them to pass to implement those policies.

Some are builders and crafts folk.  You make stuff and fix stuff and provide the world with the things we need.

Some are servers and helpers.  In stores and restaurants and activity centers you take care of people so the community works well together.

Most of all I think we are called to be lovers.  Lovers of other people in the way God loves them.  We do whatever it takes for each and every person to be valued and to have a good life.  If someone hurts or is hungry or struggles to find a good way forward, that’s our responsibility.  We’re here to support each other and to stand up to those who want to look the other way.  To insist that the world work in a way that’s good for everyone.  All lives matter.  No one is left behind.  Those aren’t just slogans, they are a way of life.  A Jesus way of life.  And that’s what it means to be a disciple.

Make disciples of all nations means make the world work for all people.  It’s a big job.  It’s what followers of Jesus have been asked to do for 2000 years.  Our turn is now. 

Pentecost

Acts 2:1-18, John 14:8-17

When the day of Pentecost had come…  Pentecost falls on the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which is a harvest festival and comes 50 days after Passover.  Like Passover Shavuot is a pilgrimage festival and people who are able travel to the Temple in Jerusalem to bring the tithe offering of their harvest.  That means that the crowd which had gathered for Passover was back and people from many places crowded the streets of Jerusalem and filled the Temple.  The soldiers would have been back, too, to keep the peace and control the crowd.

Jesus’ followers were still there – or maybe returned after going home for a while.  It’s not clear, but they were gathered.  They were still in hiding, concerned that they might be executed next because of their association with Jesus.  They were still confused and afraid.

The way the Pentecost story is told, the Spirit of God begins rushing through the room, sounding like wind and looking like fire.  They all rush out into the streets and begin talking about Jesus and resurrection with such enthusiasm that people think they are drunk, even though it’s morning.  They spoke with such conviction that people heard what they had to say in the many languages spoken among the crowds of travelers.  Peter preaches a sermon and 3,000 folks become Christians and the church is born.

I love this story.  It’s such a reason to celebrate!  It’s such an exaggeration.  We know that Rome wouldn’t have let a mass baptism happen.  We know that Jesus’ followers weren’t called Christian for several decades after this.  We know that the church as we know it didn’t emerge for several centuries.  But this is a birth story and it’s okay to exaggerate.  Remember the old song, “on the day that you were born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true”?  This story is like that.  It helps us remember that the continuation of Jesus’ ministry by his followers was a miracle and changed the world.

When we hear this story we focus on the part where God sends the Spirit.  First the disciples didn’t have Spirit and then whoosh! they did.  Like wind and fire.  I want to think about that in another way today.  In the Gospel of John, which is the last Gospel in the Bible written, the disciples ask Jesus to show them God.  Jesus points at himself and at them.  You know God because God is in you.  I wonder if the Spirit “sent” on Pentecost wasn’t also already within the folks who had gathered.  In each one and in the gathering itself.  We’re used to thinking about God – over there – and us – over here – as separate.  Lots of what Jesus teaches in his years of ministry is about God being in the people and among the community.  If that’s the case, then maybe on Pentecost the people didn’t get covered with Spirit as something new.  Maybe they woke up to the fact that Spirit was already there.  God was there.  Jesus was there – resurrected and living in them.  Maybe they just got tired of being sad and scared and hiding and said, “to hell with it.  Let’s keep telling Jesus’ story.”

And what’s the story?  How do we summarize the message that created the church we’re a part of two thousand year’s later?  We’ve heard that the message is “Jesus died for your sins.”  That’s an “outside” message.  Here you are in trouble for being a sinner and over there is God, mad about that, and Jesus, dying on the cross so God won’t be mad any more.  All the action takes place outside of us, in some cosmic battle.  That’s not the way Jesus told the story.  He said, “God is love.  Love one another.”  Love is the heart of the message and love is an “inside” story.  We’ve been told that we’re made in the image of God.  If that’s true, and God is love, then so are we.  We are love and when we act on that love, when we truly work at being love in the world, then God is in us and we are in God – just like Jesus said.  If you want to see God, look at the places where folks are living out God’s love.

Lots of times the battle between Jesus and Rome or God and Rome is told like a power struggle.  Rome killed Jesus because they were afraid he’d stir up a rebellion.  They were in control and they wanted to stay that way.  Some folks thought Jesus was going to start a war and overthrow Roman power.  He didn’t, and he wasn’t trying to.  But he was giving control back to the folks through love.  An occupying force can tax you, scare you, starve you, beat you, crucify you.  But they can’t control who you are if you are determined to love yourself and your neighbor.  Nonviolent resistance works like that.  Community organizing works like that.  If you’re determined to love, nothing has power over you – the power comes from deep within.  If a community is organized around love, nothing can stop them.  They can change the world.

Jesus talked about the Reign of God being among us.  People at first thought that meant God was going to raise up an army and overthrow Rome.  But that’s not how love works.  Empires use power to control the people and the environment they live in.  But love transforms people and environments and nothing can stop them.  The Reign of God doesn’t have to wait for an army to win a battle.  It’s alive and well and can grow through us no matter what.

I suspect the true story of Pentecost isn’t nearly as dramatic as the way we tell it.  Maybe a bunch of Jesus’ followers just got sick and tired of being afraid and quiet.  They decided they were going to tell the story of the time they spent with Jesus.  They were going to  talk about how he made them feel and how he gave them hope.  They were going to believe that his message about God’s love was true and live to make it a reality wherever they were.  Since God was right there in them and the Spirit was already moving through them, they came back alive.  They got set on fire with enthusiasm and hope.  They committed to live with love.  They changed their world and slowly they are still changing ours.

I’ve been reading lots of deep thinkers lately who want us to transform the way we see God and the world.  They are done with a God off somewhere waiting for us to get things right so he can bring us to a better place.  Some of them talk about God being the life energy of the universe.  Everything is made up of the vibrating love of God, permeating all creation.  Some of them talk about God among us evolving into more and more awareness of love and connection.  Creating a new life in this time and this place.  

Pentecost is an invitation to see God right here, right now.  Pentecost is the awakening to God living in us and through us.  It’s the power of love bringing us more and more alive, making the whole universe new.  We can dream dreams and see visions and share the amazing story of God-with-us because God IS with us.  Jesus LIVES in us.  The Spirit MOVES us out of fear into freedom and life.  

No wonder this is my favorite day!  Let’s live it together today and always!

Seventh Sunday of Easter

Deuteronomy 5:20-21

This is the last sermon in our series on the Ten Commandments (or the Ten Best Ways to Live).  Today’s last three focus on how we live in harmony with our neighbor.  Don’t bear false witness, don’t covet his wife, don’t want anything else he has.  

Don’t bear false witness may have originally been an admonition to tell the truth in court, but today I think it speaks to us more as “don’t gossip.”  Gossip may not exactly be the same as lying, but often it comes pretty close.  When I first joined Rotary, I learned The Four-Way Test which guides Rotary interactions:

Is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned?
Will it build good will and better friendships?
Will it be beneficial to all concerns?

Those are pretty helpful guidelines if we want to get along with our neighbors and build up our community.  It can be pretty tempting to pass along interesting rumors about people or organizations or our cities, but unless you know for sure it’s accurate, don’t repeat it!  We can also remember that not every thought we have needs to be spoken.  Words can build up another person and make situations better, or they can cause pain and destruction.  Let’s be on the side or “build up” or be silent.  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” 

You’ll remind me that sometimes hard truths need to be spoken aloud.  When injustice happens, if we ignore it, we give permission for it to continue.  That’s right.  Sometimes we need to speak up, but we can do so with a spirit of civil discourse and love.  We speak up to make things better – to make all people concerned better – not to tear anyone down.  We correct without criticism.  There are times in my life that friends pointed out gently things I was saying or doing that were unhelpful.  I still cherish those friendships and appreciate how they helped me be a better person.

The last two commandments are about not wanting what other people have.  I don’t know about you, but I seldom covet someone’s ox or donkey and slavery is a thing of the past (we hope).  Another person’s house or garden – that’s another thing!  If we were writing these commandments today we might include another’s success, or physical fitness, or great car, or lake house, or friends.  The list in the Bible is a starting point, not a complete catalog.  

One of the ways this idea is expressed today is in the framework of gratitude – be thankful for what you have and not worried about what you don’t have.  Be content with your home, your job, your family.  Find a way each day to see something good in your situation and decide that what you have is enough.  If you are always comparing your situation to that of others, there will always be cause for jealousy.  When those thoughts creep in, set them aside.  That doesn’t mean you never upgrade your wardrobe, your kitchen, or your vehicle.   It’s fun to be able to make improvements and enjoy them.  But don’t live for having the most or doing the best.  Constant competition with others divides us rather than bringing us together.

I want to acknowledge that this is a middle-class attitude toward this commandment.  We say “be content with what you have” because we all have more than enough for a comfortable life.  This isn’t meant to justify economic inequality, which is one way community is broken today.  If someone is hungry, we don’t say “be glad you have one meal today.”  We find a way for that person to eat.  Much of the world and many in our country live in crushing poverty.  Remember sixty years ago when Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty?  We lost that war.  We can still hold the dream of ending the vast inequality of today’s world and working for a better way.

During this series I’ve found myself saying many times that the questions these guidelines raise are harder than the simple answers they’ve sometimes been seen to be.  I want to say something about living with the questions before we finish.  Those who want to fix the world by posting the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses imply that if everyone kept the rules the world would be just fine.  Many of these same folks don’t want the world to be reformed, to address racism or poverty or unequal access to education or violence or any of the other things that make this world difficult for many folks.  The Bible isn’t a bandaid for the gaping wounds of our time.

This week I came across a quote from Marcus Borg that helps explain that:
The Bible is a human product.
It tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things.

The Ten Commandments and all the other laws in the Bible describe how the people who spoke them or wrote them and those who remembered them over time understood what God was doing in their lives.  They describe ways that people wanted to build a good life for everyone, a life they described as God’s vision for the world.  These teachings are helpful to us because they show us what worked in those times and places.  Some things work the same way today.  Others don’t, because our world is constantly evolving and the questions we must answer change with it. 

A week or so ago a woman on Facebook told me that I was living in sin and causing great harm to you because I preach that God loves everyone, and that includes standing up for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.  She quoted a verse of scripture to prove that she was right.  I didn’t bother to look it up because I’ll never agree that she’s right.  And I don’t agree because I read the Bible and hear that God is love.  That Jesus was giving his life to reform religion to be more helpful to people.  That he was teaching people how to live in supportive communities and think for themselves – encouraged by God’s love.

The Bible was never intended to give us simple answers – do this; don’t do that.  It’s a record of generations of people who thought life in relationship with a living God and a living people was better than life without.  So do we.  But it’s up to us to figure out what that means in our own time and place.  How do we love God and our neighbor in the twenty-first century?  I think we start with love.  With valuing our neighbor rather than competing to be best.  With respecting our neighbor and listening to needs and dreams.  

The questions we have to answer as we build community today are tough.  It takes lots of input from many perspectives to address them.  It takes everyone’s ideas to find a way forward.  I believe that God trusts us to do that hard work and to find a way that brings us a bit closer to a holy vision for how life works.  We won’t find the perfect solution for all time.  We can take a few steps closer to the goal and make life better for our time and the people today.  That may have to be enough.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

History of the Flower Communion

The Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion service which we are about to celebrate was originated in 1923 by Dr. Norbert Capek [pronounced Chah-Peck] founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia.  On the last Sunday before the summer recess of the Unitarian church in Prague, all the children and adults participated in this colorful ritual, which gives concrete expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith.  When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be – as Nazi court records show – “…too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.”  Dr. Capek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the next year during a Nazi “medical experiment.”  This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is widely celebrated today.  Our service includes versions of the original prayers of Dr. Capek to help us remember the principles and dreams for which he died.

The flower communion was brought to the United States in 1940 and introduced to the members of our Cambridge, Massachusetts, church by Dr. Capek’s wife, Maja V. Capek.  The Czech-born Maja had met Norbert Capek in New York City while he was studying for his Ph.D. and it was at her urging that Norbert left the Baptist Ministry and turned to Unitarianism.  The Capeks returned to Czechoslovakia in 1921 and established the dynamic liberal church in Prague; Maja Capek was ordained in 1926.  It was during her tour of the United States that Maja introduced the flower communion at the Unitarian church in Cambridge.  Unfortunately, Maja was unable to return to Prague due to the outbreak of WW II, and it was not until the war was over that Norbert Capek’s death in a Nazi concentration camp was revealed.  

The significance of the flower communion is that no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make.  Together the different flowers form a beautiful bouquet.  Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, and thus it is with our church community – it would not be the same without each and every one of us.  Thus this service is a statement of our community.  By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, disregarding all that might divide us.  Each person takes home a flower brought by someone else, thus symbolizing our shared celebration in community.  This communion of sharing is essential to a free people of a free religion.

For the Flowers Have the Gift of Language (no author given)

Speak, flowers, speak!
Why do you say nothing?
The flowers have the gift of language.
In the meadow they speak of freedom,
Creating patterns wild and free as no gardener could match.
In the forest they nestle, snug carpets under the roof of
Leaf and branch, making a rug of such softness.
At end tip of branches they cling briefly
Before bursting into fruit sweet to taste.

Flowers, can you not speak joy to our sadness?
And hope to our fear?
Can you not say how it is with you
That you color the darkest corner?

The flowers have the gift of language.
At the occasion of birth, they are buds before bursting.
At the ceremony of love, they unite two lovers in beauty.
At the occasion of death, they remind us how lovely is life.

Oh, would that you had voice,
Silent messengers of hope.
Would that you could tell us how you feel,
Arrayed in such beauty.

The flowers have the gift of language.
In the dark depths of a death camp
They speak the light of life.
In the face of cruelty
They speak of courage.
In the experience of ugliness
They bespeak the persistence of beauty.

Speak, messengers, speak!
For we would hear your message.
Speak, messengers, speak!
For we need to hear what you would say.

For the flowers have the gift of language:
They transport the human voice on winds of beauty;
They lift the melody of song to our ears;
They paint through the eye and hand of the artist;
Their fragrance binds us to sweet-smelling earth.

May the blessing of the flowers be upon you.
May their beauty beckon to you each morning
And their loveliness lure you each day,
And their tenderness caress you each night.
And their eyes make you aware.
May their stems make you sturdy.
And their reaching make you care.

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Deuteronomy 5:17-19

You shall not murder.
Neither shall you commit adultery.
Neither shall you steal.

This is a very short scripture that contains very big ideas.  In reality, it’s all about stealing something that’s not yours.

Murder steals a life.

Years ago when women were the property of their husbands, adultery stole property.  It also stole the assurance that a man’s children were really his own.

Stealing property of any kind takes away something that belongs to another.

All of these commandments take about how we relate to one another in community.  When we respect each other, then we are unable to do harm to each other.  These rules are about not doing harm.

These seem pretty straightforward, but there are complexities and nuances that make them much more difficult to follow.  Consider murder.  It’s pretty easy to say we don’t kill one another.  None of us is inclined to do that.  But consider warfare when soldiers of one side kill the other – kill or be killed.  Wars are sometimes fought over important issues.  We agree that it’s good to support Ukraine in their battle for freedom and we’re supplying them the weapons that are killing many Russian soldiers.  Is supplying weapons murder?  Does it matter if we shoot first or respond to attack?  All of our denominations are on record as supporting members who are conscientious objectors.  That was more of an issue when our nation had a draft.  Then we affirmed those who wanted to serve in the military as medics or support personnel rather than being in direct combat.  

We are all horrified at the civilian deaths in the war in Ukraine.  At the same time we’re unaware of how our own nation has contributed to civilian death.  I just finished reading An Indigenous People’s History of the United States which lays out how we murdered women and children in villages in order to open our nation to settlement.  We didn’t come to a land that was unpopulated, so we depopulated it.  The kind of warfare that does anything necessary to win continues to this day.  We killed many villagers in Viet Nam.  Our drones have missed military targets and killed many civilians in places all around the world.  To what extent are we responsible for what our country does around the world?  What influence should we have over our military?

We are hearing a lot right now about the issue of reproductive rights and access to abortion.  Some people are convinced that abortion is murder and others say it’s not.  How do we talk to one another about women’s rights and health care?  

Adultery is much less of an issue in contemporary culture than it once was, maybe because it’s become so common.  We no longer consider women as the property of their husbands so adultery is no longer stealing the property of another.  When these commands were written, adultery was much more the action of a man toward another man’s wife than a mutual decision among consenting adults.  Adultery breaks a commitment that has been made.  This commandment encourages us to take those commitments seriously.  

At one time ending a marriage was considered adultery, but now divorce is much more common.  Divorce allows people who are being abused in a relationship to end it – men or women.  Divorce allows people who have grown apart over time to end unhealthy relationships and perhaps to begin another in a better way.  This commandment suggests that we not do that lightly.  That we not be too quick to give up on one another without making a sincere effort to make marriages work.  At the same time we need to support people whose marriages are unhealthy in finding a better way to live.

And then we consider “do not steal.”  That’s perhaps the most clear of these commandments.  Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you.  In any way.  Don’t cheat on your taxes.  Pay your employees a fair wage.  Today we might say, “support economic justice for everyone.”  It is ungodly, perhaps, for some to make billions of dollars while their employees barely scrape by.  None of us becomes affluent on our own.  Those who are successful in business benefit from the work of their employees and the support of customers.  Wealth doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It’s appropriate for it to be shared equitably.

All of these commandments are about how we order society for the benefit of everyone.  They are about creating norms and regulations that make life good for all people.  They are about respecting and trusting each other and not taking advantage of anyone.  We live by these rules not just because God tells us to do so, but because we genuinely care for one another.  Maybe that’s why Jesus summarized the commandments as “love God/love your neighbor.”  When you treat each other with love and respect , there are things you don’t do to each other.  When we rely on each other to behave in loving ways, our world works better.  That’s why the commandments can be called “the ten best ways to live.”

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Deuteronomy 5:12-16

We have two of the ten commandments to consider today in our effort to talk about all ten during the season of Easter.  We’re looking at these commandments not as rules we must follow but as gifts which help us live long and full lives.  Today we talk about honor – honoring time and rest and honoring parents.

The honoring of sabbath is about taking a break from physical work.  It’s a radical thought that everyone deserves a day off.  We are used to thinking about weekends as down time, but they are a very recent development in the history of humanity.  In a subsistence economy where you work to stave off starvation, exposure to the elements and death, taking a day off is a risk.  It’s also an exaggeration.  Of course someone has to cook, stoke the fire, feed the livestock and keep life going, even if you aren’t weaving or working the fields.

Notice in this commandment that everyone gets time off, not just the wealthy or those who own slaves who can insist that someone else work while they rest.  Everyone rests.  This surely bolstered the case of organized labor for first 60 and then the amazing 40 hour work week.  It also led to the complicated sabbath laws of our most orthodox Jewish neighbors – leading to lights on timers so no switch is flipped on the sabbath, meals cooked ahead, and housing clusters near synagogues so that no one walks too many steps to get to the services.  We might think of these rules as extreme, and they certainly can be.  They also help to focus on God, just like fasting during Ramadan, which has just ended.  They can be a rule as an end in itself, or a practice as a means to deeper faith.  

We may have rejected the practices of 100 years ago when no one worked on Sunday, children only played with religious-themed toys or read religious books.  Stores closed.  But we’ve lost something if we give up the idea of rest in the rhythm of our lives.  Already our work week is creeping closer to 50 hours.  Weekends become the time to clean house, shop for groceries, do laundry for the week ahead, mow the lawn.  When everyone works away from home, time off is time to do household chores.  As our world becomes more global, our friends may observe Sabbath on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.  We can’t make local rules to favor one over the other.  But it’s good for us to protect some time for rest, for reflection, for restoring our souls.  

Sabbath may look quite different to each of us because we have different personalities and varying demands on our time.  You may find sabbath in reading a book, going to dinner with friends, watching a movie with family.  Sabbath means doing something you love in an intentional way.  It might be painting or gardening or jogging in the greenway.  It’s a change of pace, a time without stress or deadlines.  In a culture which seems to expect more and more of us, it’s good for us to stand up for time off.  It’s good to praise folks for doing a bit of nothing on a regular basis.

The second commandment for today reminds us to honor our parents.  It’s good for this to fall on Mother’s Day, although the original Mother’s Day was a peace movement and not a time for giving gifts and breakfast in bed.  In recent years we’ve been encouraged to celebrate this in the church as Christian Family Day, since all of us have families of one kind or another and not all of us are parents.  This becomes a day of gratitude for our families and for the older folks in our lives who have nurtured us in formal and informal ways.

Our Tuesday study group last week read about Native cultures in which both children and older adults are honored by holding special responsibilities in the community.  Older folk are valued as the sharers of stories and wisdom.  Children are given tasks that match their growing abilities.  Often in contemporary times both the old and the young are marginalized as contributing members of society.  I notice a difference in the children I know between those whose chores are essential and those without regular chores.  Being valued for who you are matters AND so does being valued for what you do.  The older women I hang out with often talk about becoming invisible as they age.  People talk past them rather than to them.  Those who have been competent professionals are treated as though they have nothing to add to the conversation.  Discounting anyone because of age – young or old – is to withdraw honor and it doesn’t serve us.

Sometimes this commandment has been used to tell children that they must obey parents or authority figures without question.  I don’t think that’s what this means.  We can give honor to a parent without always agreeing with them.  Loving parents often encourage children to explore their own truth and form their own opinions.  I don’t always like what my children think, but I’m glad they have the confidence to think for themselves.  As parents, grandparents and mentors we need to remember that honor is due us not for our roles or our age but because of our behavior.  We need to act in honorable ways.  We need to be loving and compassionate and just.  Honor isn’t about being obeyed, it’s about being valued because we have been loving.

Not all family relationships are easy.  This commandment isn’t meant to gloss over those times when families are broken and healing is needed.  There’s great pain in being poorly parented.  There’s pain in raising children who don’t thrive because of illness or mental illness or poor choices.  I hope our community is strong enough to open our hearts to those who experience family pain and help bring hope and peace to difficult situations.  We aren’t meant to pretend that family is always ideal.  Perhaps we’re meant to be family for those whose own families have let them down.  To be a place of hope and encouragement and home.

Third Sunday of Easter

Deuteronomy 5:7-11

In this season of Easter I’ve set a challenge for us to read and think about the Ten Commandments.  We’re doing this because we’re thinking about the ways Easter is a celebration of life in the here and now, and because the traditional commandments are sometimes called the “ten best ways to live.”  I want to think about them together not as rules but as world-view – a description of how we understand life in general and God’s relationship to us in the thick of that life.

So today we start with what are the first two or three commandments, depending on how you count:

You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make idols.
You shall not take God’s name in vain (or make wrongful use of it).

Our spiritual ancestors lived in a time when people related to many different gods – one for each aspect of their daily lives.  We read stories about Greek, Roman and sometimes Egyptian gods of thunder, beauty, wine, fire, and more.  We see paintings and statues of these various which we associate with idols or images that are worshiped.  Each country or city had its own favorite God which they hoped to persuade to protect them and send them what they needed – rain, sun, harvest.

In the oldest passages of our scriptures God is called El or the plural Elohim.  This is the god associated with Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel.  El is not thought of as the only God but simply as the Hebrews’ god, better than the gods of their neighbors.  The first commandment “no other gods before me” implies that there are other gods, and people would have thought that way.  In fact several times in the biblical narrative people get in trouble for worshiping other gods, particularly Ba’al, who was god of the Canaanites.

More recent (as in only 3500 years old) passages use the name Yahweh for God.  This is the name revealed to Moses in the burning bush.  With this new name for God the people began to move from “our god is the best god” to “our God is the only god.”  This is monotheism (one God) and echoes earlier movements in Egyptian and Zoroastrian religions.  It’s not widely popular because having more gods improves your odds of survival.  Maybe that’s why there are such awful threats made for the consequences of worshiping idols.  Becoming monotheists was hard.

An idol is not actually a god, it’s a representation of the god to help people remember their relationship with god.  It could be argued that a crucifix functions in the same way ancient idols did – reminding people of Jesus.  It’s not the image that’s worshiped but the god behind the image.  Yahweh has no images, being more than any one thing can represent, but the Ark of the Covenant functioned for early peoples in the same way that idols might.  It was the “throne” of God, where God “sat” in fire or smoke when present with the people.  It was placed in the holiest place in the tabernacle and later the temple and represented the presence of God.  After it was lost in war the thinking about God’s presence had to evolve to a higher level which didn’t require an object but was still associated with the place in the Holy of Holies.  Devout Moslems take this commandment to another level and forbid any art which depicts actual objects or people and therefore we get the beautiful mosaics of medieval mosques.

Then there’s the command not to make wrongful use of God’s name.  We think of that as “don’t swear” and it’s not widely enforced today.  Originally people swore oaths in God’s name, asking God to confirm that they would keep their word.  It was like signing a contract and bound a person’s honor and God’s honor together.  Not taking it lightly meant not obligating God to a promise you didn’t intend to keep.  When we studied The Four Agreements we talked about “be impeccable with your word.”  Be truthful and accurate in your speech.  This commandment is really about honesty and integrity more than about colorful vocabulary.

Let’s think more about what it means to honor only God in our time.  We take this with its original meaning of “our god’s better than your god.”  I was raised to believe that Christianity is the one true religion and all others worship false gods.  But what if the world’s religions don’t worship different gods but instead worship a single god in different ways.  Islam sees Allah as the god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  One god.  Hinduism talks of 3000+ gods but also understands one holy being uniting all gods.  Buddhism doesn’t worship god but still sees a universal connection of all life.  We might benefit from considering whether our religion has become an idol that we worship more than we worship God.  Looking for connection rather than rejection of others would help the world respect everyone better and perhaps expand the ways we honor God.

We also need to consider the ancient assumption that God chooses us for special privilege – for the blessings in life.  It’s good to be chosen and cherished.  It’s not helpful to think that others are rejected.  In our country we have a great fear of Sharia law practiced in some Moslem countries, but we’re quick to make laws that match our personal preferences and name them as God’s will.  The current debate about abortion law isn’t about how to best care for mothers and children.  That debate would be helpful and important.  New laws are more about controlling women than about helping them bear and raise children in healthy relationships.  Under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny we conquered the native peoples of North America and took their land, saying it was God’s will that we rule from sea to sea.  Some folks currently are lifting up Viktor Orban as a wonderful ruler because he’s restoring Hungary to Christianity, beginning with the oppression of LGBTQIA+ folks.  Is it really God’s will that some people be persecuted for who they are?  

As a congregation we have made a commitment to justice and equality.  We try hard to understand economic justice and to encourage mental and physical health for everyone.  We question systemic racism which leads to unequal incarceration rates, unequal educational opportunity, and fear of immigrants.  It’s important that we continue to speak out as a faith community to correct the mistakes of the past because at the same time folks are claiming such injustice is God’s will.  That seems like idolatry to me:  claiming God’s support for our personal preferences.  Even as we speak out in support of change, we need to constantly examine if we are doing what we accuse others of doing.  With humility we seek to understand Jesus’ teachings about compassion, mercy and justice and not assume we’ve got it right.  

We are working to make rightful use of God’s name in shaping a world in God’s image.  Not as an idol but as a growing life.  We ask ourselves in every situation if we are acting out of love, God’s love for every creature.  We remain open to learning more about what it means to live in God’s way.  We try, we change, we try again.  

This commandment isn’t about being Christian like we’ve always been and assuming we’ve got it right.  It’s about seeking to align our lives with what is holy and loving and inclusive and learning every day to do better.  To be more respectful, compassionate, generous and just.  To not let convenience take the place of God in all we do and say.

Honoring God as having first place in our lives is a way of understanding life as holy.  It sets the tone for all the other commandments and covenants we’ll consider in this season.  It’s the framework for understanding who we are and what we do.  That’s a good beginning.

Second Sunday of Easter

Deuteronomy 5:1-6, 17-20

Last week when we celebrated Easter I talked about the fact that the Easter story is about life in two ways – an eternal life which overcomes death and a new and better way of living while we occupy these bodies we call ours.  During the Easter season of seven Sundays, I want to focus on the second way in which we have new life in and through Jesus – a life for living today and every day.  And I want to start by looking at the Ten Commandments, or as my favorite version calls them:  the ten best ways to live.

Before we can think about the individual commandments, some of which appear in today’s reading, I want to back up a step and think about what these commandments are.  They are part of one of many covenants that our spiritual ancestors understood as defining their relationship with God.  And before we can talk about this covenant, we have to back up two steps and talk about who are spiritual ancestors were.

The earliest physical or historical evidence of the people known as Hebrews (or Hapiru) shows up in the land now claimed by Israel about 1200 BCE – or about the time we know as the Exodus from Egypt.  This is the story our Jewish friends were celebrating as Passover, ending last night.  Moses leads the people out of Egypt into the Promised Land, a process that required over 40 years and two different leaders, Moses and Joshua.  It’s interesting that the records of Egypt, an empire which kept meticulous records, don’t mention this event.  Maybe because they were embarrassed by it or maybe because our version of it is more precise than the actual events.  At any rate, about this time several nomadic tribes, some from Egypt and some from farther east of this land along the Jordan River appear in archaeology and written records.  They don’t seem to be a single nation but over time become a loose federation of tribes, each with its own ancestors.  Scholars believe that as these tribes cooperated in warfare, and in settling in a new land they began to tell their origin stories in a way that braided them together.  It’s like when our generation does an search on Ancestry.com and we have a “mother’s side” and a “father’s side” and more and more branches as we trace our history, but in the current moment, all these stories come together and are OUR story.  

It's hard to reconstruct this weaving of stories because its roots are so ancient and the record is very murky.  But it’s probable that those who came together about 3000 years ago told the story of being set free to come to this new place.  And each group told ancestor stories with names like Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel.  Over time these stories become one long story.  These diverse peoples then become our spiritual ancestors.  For the purposes of the next few weeks, we need to recall that they identified themselves as being the people of their God and they described that relationship by way of covenants they had made with God.

Covenants were familiar to these people because that’s how rulers made agreements in their time.  We call them treaties and trade organizations in our time.  They described what each party was going to do for the other, how they would relate to each other, and they started with a ceremony marking the beginning.  Let’s recall some of the covenants that are part of our spiritual heritage. 

• There’s the covenant with Noah that says God won’t destroy all the earth’s creatures through flood.  The ceremony of this covenant is the rainbow that appears after the storm. 

•  There’s the covenant with Abraham that says his descendants will be the tribe that’s special to God.  The first sign of this covenant is a ceremony in which Abraham cuts in half a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon, sets them in two rows, and while Abraham is in a semi-trance a “smoking pot and a flaming torch” move between the rows.  The second sign of this covenant is the practice of circumcision.

• There’s the covenant with Moses, which is represented by the Torah or law which describes how the people will act in daily life.

• There’s the covenant with David that his descendants will rule Judah forever, which came to be represented by the hope for a Messiah King in David’s lineage.

We have to remember that covenants describe relationships.  They are about the responsibilities each party accepts and what they will do as they keep the covenant.  Covenants we enter into today include marriage and mortgages.  There are neighborhood covenants that tell us what we can plant and what color our house can be (and in the past, what color our skin could be).  We call baptism a covenant that defines who we are as a person of faith.  So when we talk about commandments and covenants over the next few weeks, we’re going to be thinking about all the relationships which are a part of our lives and how they function.

I want to suggest one more way we think about these relationships to set a starting place.  We are told that humanity was made in the image of God.  Usually we think of that as God – the first being – taking dirt and making a sculpture that becomes a human, in God’s image.  As we become more sophisticated in our thinking, we say that it’s not our bodies that are in God’s image (after all there are many different kinds of bodies) but our spirits.  The soul which is the heart of our humanity is the image of God.  Let’s take that one step further.  My oldest daughter many years ago gave me a book which suggested that everything that IS comes from the essence of God.  It described that by saying whatever was before the “Big Bang” was God, and the BANG was God exploding into matter which forms everything.  In that suggestion the image of God is the DNA which determines everything about life and the energy which animates it.  We are in the image of God because the stuff of which we are created comes directly from the being of God.  

If we are all made of the substance of God, then we are in covenant with each other because we are all made of one life.  We are connected in our very cells by who we are.  Relationships become not agreements made between separate people or beings that last as long as we get along and end when we choose.  If we are all part of one life, we can’t simply choose to go our separate ways because there’s no true separate.  We’re interconnected by our very existence.  We must then learn to get along.

So let me suggest that this is our starting place for the next few weeks:  we are all creatures made in the image of God and connected to each other.  What connects us is the essence of God at the very heart of our being.  What we do about that is the way we form communities and live lives which reflect the presence of God through us.  The questions we bring to this series are these:  How are we to live together so we make God visible and known?  And how does God live in this world through us?

Easter Sunday

John 20:1-18

This year the three Abrahamic religions are celebrating major holy days at the same time.  Christians celebrate Easter; Jews are in the midst of Passover; Muslims are observing Ramadan. These three celebrations honor differing stories but they have a common theme:  God in our midst brings life.

At Passover our Jewish neighbors tell the story of the Exodus when God set their ancestors free from slavery in Egypt and brought them to a new land where they could become God’s people in a new and intentional way.  In Ramadan our Moslem neighbors fast and pray during daylight hours to commemorate Muhammad’s receiving the words of the Quran, their holy scripture.  Both of these observances are life-giving.  God gave the Jews a new life in a new place as a new people.  God gave Moslems the Quran as a guide to a new way of living centered on God’s love and guidance. 

We are familiar with Easter as the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection after he was killed by Rome. We read the story of how first the women among his followers and then the disciples themselves found his tomb empty, saw angels, heard that he had been raised to life, and then saw for themselves a resurrected Jesus.  Most of this celebration focuses on the belief that if Jesus can overcome death, so can we.  It’s a celebration of the persistence of life, even in the face of death.  Because he lives, we will also live forever – beyond this life into the life of eternity.  In our hemisphere is usually coincides with the celebration of spring when the world comes alive again after winter.  (Although this year the weather is more appropriate for the celebration of Christmas with its snowy nights.)

There’s a second way that Easter means new life that I’d like us to think about today.  This way focuses on Jesus’ vision for what life can be when we are fully connected to God and to each other.  We talk often about Jesus’ vision that he shared in his years of traveling and teaching.  

• It was a nonviolent vision – not advocating for the revolution that people wanted but for meeting violence with peace.  Turn the other cheek; love your enemy.

• It was a vision which honored all people – men, women and children; leaders and peasants; workers and beggars, including those who were ill or disabled.

• It was a vision of economic justice, calling on those who were wealthy to make the lives of  poorer folk easier.

• It was a vision of healing – body, mind and community.

• It was a vision of a good life in which everyone ate, everyone was included, everyone worked together to see that all were cared for.

People came to Jesus in crowds.  They wanted to see if he really was healing folks who had been blind, lame, or mentally ill.  They wanted to hear him talk about a new way of living together.  They wanted to hope that new life was possible.

When Jesus was executed, his disciples assumed that the movement Jesus started was over.  He was dead. Rome had the last word.  They were afraid that they’d be executed next and they hid.  Only the women dared to go to the tomb and care for his body.  But they didn’t find a body.  Instead they found hope.  The word was that Jesus had risen from the dead.  If he is risen, maybe his vision can rise with him.

Notice that those who “see” Jesus on Easter and the days following don’t recognize him.  He looks different.  Sometimes they only know him from his voice.  He speaks to them and then they see.  Scripture tells us that getting to an understanding of Easter is a gradual process.  It takes days, even months.  Some people sign on right away and others need more evidence.  Seven weeks from today we’re going to celebrate Pentecost, the day the disciples came out of hiding and started sharing Jesus’ message with the world.  Easter and Pentecost bookend a process in which people assimilate what it means for Jesus to be alive.  The message is “He is risen!” which also means “He is still with us!”  It’s not over.

The prominent message of Easter is about eternal life.  Over the centuries, it’s what Christianity has become – a promise of life beyond death.  It gives us comfort in hard times and solace when we grieve.  The second message of Easter may be just as important.  Jesus is still among us and his vision for life is still powerful.  These two messages tell us that Easter is about life – beyond this life AND in the midst of this life.  God through Jesus is a part of both.

We come to this Easter celebration in a moment that’s difficult.  The world is at war in a more visible way.  Our nation is divided about who we should be and what we should do for one another. We are struggling to understand those divisions and their roots in racism and injustice.  AND we come to this Easter celebration with hope – a hope that began on the first Easter and has continued for over 2000 years.  Our hope is rooted in the conviction that no matter what the world does, Jesus is still with us and his vision is still alive among us.  We can make peace.  We can connect with one another, even across lines of difference.  We can heal bodies and minds and spirits.  We can feed and clothe and house those in need.  We can welcome those who have been cast out.  Life is stronger than death and we can create life among us. 

As followers of Jesus we have the privilege of making his life visible now.  We are his body in this time and place and he is with us, in us, through us.  Every day we affirm that he is risen as we show he is present here and now.  Today we celebrate Easter.  Every day we ARE Easter.  That is a sign of hope and a life of joy.

Palm Sunday

Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday is one of my favorite celebrations – and maybe one of yours, too.  It’s fun waving palms and shouting Hosanna!  This is one of the rare stories found in all four of our gospels, so it must have been a favorite of Jesus’ followers from the beginning.

The story is set in Jerusalem when people are gathering for Passover, a spring festival that celebrates God setting people free from slavery in Egypt.  Those who were able to travel were required to be in Jerusalem for Passover, so there would have been thousands of travelers crowding the streets.  As they came into the city, they would have been singing verses from the Psalms, like we did today.  John tells us that as they gathered, they were wondering if the new prophet from Galilee would show up for the festival.

This is a celebration of freedom observed by people who were occupied and oppressed.  They were in a mood for something important to happen in the face of Rome.  Jesus is staying with friends in the nearby village of Bethany, and when he comes to the city it’s no surprise that a spontaneous welcome breaks out in the crowd.  Matthew quotes scripture to prove that Jesus is coming as the Messiah – reflecting his agenda to prove that to later first-century Jews.  Maybe people saw Jesus as a Messiah.  They certainly saw him as a challenge to Roman rulers.  They were hoping for insurrection.  (They never dreamed they’d get resurrection instead.)  Surely the positive reaction of the crowd to Jesus’ presence and their attention to his teaching prompted Rome to arrest him and execute him.  They too saw him as a threat to the peace, if not to their power.

We’ve talked in other years about the fact that Jesus is portrayed as entering Jerusalem from one direction in peace while Roman soldiers are entering from another direction in a show of military force.  The troops are coming to control the crowds about to gather.  They don’t want trouble and they have the physical might to squelch any uprisings.  I’m pretty sure the contrast between military power and peace was lost on the crowds that day.  They wanted an armed uprising that threw off Roman control.  They weren’t looking for a theological understanding of the nature of power and the reign of God.  Those understandings only come after decades or centuries of reflection.  What the story was about on the day it happened and what it means to us two millennia later aren’t the same.  

Let’s start with a parade that celebrates Jesus.  In the first century that would have been a spontaneous challenge to established power.  It would have been a hope for the overthrow of oppressive government and a violent response to the violence of the times.  The people celebrating for the most part misunderstood all that Jesus was teaching about peace and love.  But they did understand what he was saying about justice and the abuse of power.  Their society needed to change, and Jesus represented change, even if they weren’t ready to hear his non-violent teachings. 

 A parade that celebrates Jesus today wouldn’t be a challenge to power it would celebrate the prominence of Christianity as a force in contemporary life.  Some of the conservative churches in our towns are planning a March for Jesus this spring.  This march won’t be a challenge to those things in our current society that are unjust and divisive.  It will celebrate the values of the Christian right – many of which bear no resemblance to Jesus’ teachings.  It will be an endorsement of power and a way of thinking that seeks to control social norms based on a misunderstanding of Jesus’ vision.  I suspect it will stand in stark contrast to the first Palm Sunday because it celebrates the way that Christianity has become the Empire.

Next, let’s look at the role of violence in this story.  The Psalms quoted suggest that Jesus comes in peace, symbolized by the donkey he rides (which isn’t a war horse).  Jesus’ teachings are about peace – turn the other cheek, go the second mile, love your enemy.  He wanted to change the way life worked as much as those who advocated revolution, but he wanted to do that in a very different way.  He talked about forming community, caring for one another and sharing power for the benefit of everyone.  Rome maintained control of society for the benefit of the wealthy through violence, particularly crucifixion and warfare.  Centuries later we are still unpacking what nonviolence means and how it can be used to create a better world.

It’s very hard for us to understand how nonviolence and the teachings of Jesus can operate in a world even more visibly at war in this moment.  It’s tempting to meet bombs with bombs and death with death.  Our world has been attacked – indeed has never been without attacks in one place or another.  The current violence in Ukraine is just more visible to us that some of the many other places at war.  I have no answers as to what a follower of Jesus would do in response.  I do know what Jesus did. He confronted abusive power and called it out for what it is.  He encouraged people to live from a core of love and compassion.    That’s incredibly hard.

Russia is by no means the only aggressor in our moment in history.  While we name aloud their actions, we also need to name the ways in which we too participate in the abuse of power and in violence toward others.  Sometimes that’s military violence, but it’s also economic and racial.  It has to do with the distribution of wealth and the opening of opportunity, with available food and health care and education.  It has to do with how we live within our country and as leaders in a complicated world.  

Our time in history feels more complicated to us than the first century, maybe because we’re living in the thick of it and lack the perspective of time.  So the lessons we learn from Palm Sunday are also more complicated.  They tell us to celebrate – who Jesus is and what he teaches us to do and to be.  Celebrations matter.  We can embrace them.  At the same time, we celebrate not because Jesus eventually won and we benefit from being on top.  We celebrate because we too stand at a moment when change is both badly needed and possible.  Like our spiritual ancestors we hope that Jesus brings something different, and we don’t yet understand what that is.  We want God’s vision to be in control of the world and we aren’t quite sure how to make that happen.  

This week Katanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the next Supreme Court justice.  The hearings around her approval demonstrated the progress of our nation and the great distance we still have to go.  She represents a milestone in justice and freedom and the fact that we aren’t yet on the same page.  She represents possibility.  We are celebrating what has happened, even as we clarify what still needs to come.  It’s a good example of what it means to celebrate a Palm Sunday moment.  Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.  Now that we see him among us, what will we do next?

Fifth Sunday in Lent

Luke 13:18-21

Jesus lived in a difficult time.  We’ve highlighted all the troubles of the first century many times – Roman occupation, income inequity, disease, poverty, hunger, violence, war, slavery, religious and political divisions.  Maybe we talk about how hard life was then because when we make the list it sounds like today.  What goes around comes around.

In those difficult times Jesus talked often about the Kingdom of God. 

“The Kingdom of God is among you.” 

You are invited into the Kingdom.  Today we read about the nature of God’s Kingdom.  It’s like he’s saying that despite how hard life seems, a better way is possible.  In fact, it’s already here if we learn to see it and to live it.  Like the seed planted that grows into a tree or the yeast that makes flour rise into bread.  Small things can make a big difference over time if we encourage them.

You are often at the mercy of whatever I’ve been reading lately as the things I learn creep into the sermons.  Today I want to share with you something from the book God: A Human History by Reza Aslan.  It’s a big idea and sermons are short, so stick with me.  We know that throughout history there have been many ways to think and talk about God.  In earliest prehistory people seem to have seen God in the things that made life possible – the pregnant female figures of most ancient times, the beast-man god which blessed hunters, the sun & rain gods that made crops grow, the war gods which protected from dangerous neighbors.  These became over time the Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons, or household of gods in charge of everything that happens. Eventually they became the Jewish god Yahweh, father of Jesus, recognized as Allah by Islam.  This is the God we know and love.  

Behind this urge to know and to name God is an eternal sense that there is more about life than just what can be seen or touched.  That life has a soul that connects with humans and with all creation, making us who we are.  People who know nothing about God still innately connect with something larger than individual life and even larger than community.  Something beyond.

In his book Aslan traces the history of all the ways people have thought about God as they evolved into more complex societies.   There are two common threads –every society believes there is something indescribable that they call “God,” and everyone describes that something in human terms.  God loves, blesses, holds, creates and sometimes judges and destroys.  God exhibits both positive and negative emotions we experience – because we have no way to talk about God except in terms of what we know.  We want to relate to God but we don’t know how to do that except in terms of personal relationships – so we understand God in personal ways.  We don’t have vocabulary for something or someone so exceptional, so we use the personal words we have and then say, “only bigger and better.”  

That is part of what it means to be human and it’s perfectly okay.  I would never suggest that however you connect with God isn’t right.  Any relationship we have with God that works for us is to be celebrated.  But today I want to suggest that you consider adding to that relationship an idea Aslan gives us.  Here it is:

Drawing on his personal experiences in Christianity and Islam, particularly on the mystical Sufi tradition, Aslan starts with the understanding that God created everything that is.  We’ve read stories about that this Lent!  The question is – if God created everything, then what did God create it from?  The logical answer is God created from God’s own being – because there was nothing else.  Before creation there is only God and therefore anything that exists as part of creation had to come from God.  Which leads us to say, “everything that exists IS God” – in essence.  That doesn’t mean that each individual is the totality of God, but that every person, creature, or thing was made from the being of God.  Like a drop is part of the ocean or a leaf is part of a tree.

Several years ago Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Eckhart Tolle and asked him what he thought of God.  He replied, “I am God.”  Which led Oprah to panic, thinking of all the angry emails she was about to get.  But by the end of the interview series she understood what he meant – not that he alone was God but that God was fully in him because God is fully in everything that is.  Eckhart was God because every person is God and all that exists is God.  And still God is more.  This is what Aslan concludes from his study of the religious impulse throughout history.  It’s what I hear when we read that God created humans “in God’s image.”  I offer the thought to you to hold alongside what you already know about God.  In addition to your connection with the God you have come to know, consider that God is also a part of you – of everything – and that your life then reflects the presence, the very being, of God.  The air you breathe, the energy moving in every cell, the mystery we call “Life” is God.

Then let’s come back to today’s scripture and the idea that the Kingdom of God is growing in the world, through the world, through us.  It’s certainly true that not everything happening in the world today is godly.  People and systems have the freedom to ignore what we call God and to act in terrible, hurtful ways.  They also have the potential to act in loving and healing ways.  I think Jesus tells us that the reign of God comes from that potential.  Yes, we live in troubled times, but we can transform our times by the way we live.  Yes the world is at war in Ukraine and many other places, AND the world is standing up to injustice, feeding and housing refugees, offering love in the midst of fear.  Yes the need in our own community can be overwhelming AND we can cook a meal, plant a garden, give blood, help a friend. 

I believe that God is the life that moves in us all and that it’s possible for God to be known in our living.  Every day you are making God visible and others are showing God to you.  I hope you see some bit of that today.  I hope you claim the promise that gives our world.

Fourth Sunday in Lent

1 John 4:7-12 & John 3:11-17

Let's talk about love. Love is all around us. Love is in the air. We easily add heart emojis to our texts and facebook posts and more - sometimes in long chains: love, love, love, love. Love is so easy to say and so hard to do.

God is love. Let us love one another. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love is the very core not only of our religion but of who we are. Made in the image of God our essential nature is love.  But not many of us pull off being loving day in and day out.  If love is  who we are, why is it so hard to be loving?

Let's not start with how we keep messing up these clear requests for how we live. Let's start before that: not with what we do but with who we are. Let's start with "you are loved." God so loved the world. We are bombarded every day with thousands, maybe millions, of messages and very few of them are this:  you are loved.  Many of them tell  us what's wrong with us. You are too fat, too short, too tall, too thin, too young, too old, too dumb, too smart, too poor, too rich, too liberal, too conservative, too out of shape, too obsessed with exercise, too lazy, too busy, too talkative, too quiet. Have I hit your buttons yet? If Goldilocks is known for finding something just right, we have very few Goldilocks moments in life. And when we do, we seldom remember those good messages and instead focus on what's wrong with whatever.

 Into all that noise Jesus' message comes to us: you are loved.

In a happy accident we printed the wrong scripture in the bulletin today - the long story  of Jesus' interaction with the Samaritan  woman at the public well.  You've probably heard that story. The woman has come to the well at midday when few others would be there because she was the talk of the town. Jesus asks her for water, violating social taboos that say a man can't talk to an unknown woman. She was a Samaritan and he a Jew, enemy factions that had nothing to do with each other. When she asks about why he's breaking down these barriers, he tells her to call her husband. Then tells her she's had five and is living with a man who's not her husband. We hear this as promiscuity. It may or may not be. In the first century it would have been about economic insecurity.

A woman without a husband or adult children would have no legal means to support herself. This woman didn't divorce five men because women weren't allowed to divorce anyone. Five men had either died or driven her out and she was forced to accept the charity of a sixth in order to survive.  We don't know how exploited she was, but we  know that the community looked down on her, without empathy for her vulnerable situation. Yet Jesus spoke to her like an equal, someone to have an important conversation with. He offered her respect and dignity. It was an act of love.

Through Jesus God says to us over and over "you are loved." Love doesn't depend on your circumstances or your behavior. It doesn't depend on keeping the rules and having everything go well. You are loved - before anything else.

So love isn't the endpoint of our living, it's the beginning. Whatever love we're able to express flows from that beginning. Because you are loved, you can love one another. The first letter from John tells us that we know about God's love because we can see it in action. We know about God by the way we live God into the world. For us as a congregation we've decided that means to welcome everyone: welcoming all into the fullness of God's love. For some of us that means we cook. Remember the resident of LaGrave on First who asked why we cooked for him, as he said, "an old drunk." We cook because we love our neighbors, some of whom live at LaGrave. For others we make quilts and blankets. We wrap people in love, especially in times they feel most unloved. A few of you donate blood.  That kind of love is life-saving.  Others offer care to family members out of love. Or rides to appointments for friends and neighbors. Or donations to help people keep apartments and be sheltered. Or food for refugees from war.

Each one of us loves in unique ways, but each of those loving actions is a sign of God among us. The Gospel of John tells us that love leads to eternal life. Jesus comes to the world when it's broken and hurting to invite people to love each other. Over the years we've come to think that this love gives us a passkey to heaven - eternal life. I believe that's true. But first it helps us create heaven among us. When we love one another, heaven is already here.

Yesterday my daughter and I were reflecting on how crazy life is right now. People are busy trying to make a living and care for families. Each day brings unexpected challenges and stresses to overcome. When we think we're about to see an easy way, somebody at work or in our family manages to make things harder. Then there's a country running amok and Russian starting a war. Why are things so broken?  I told her I hope it's because we're about to evolve to a higher plain and the chaos is resistance to that progress.  Meanwhile, what do we do while we wait for the world around us to evolve with us?

We love. Through our frustration, we love. Through our fear, we love. Love insists on telling the truth in the face of lies. Love says no to violence and destruction.  Love stands alongside folks experiencing the consequences of poor choices and extends another chance to choose again. Love cooks and sews and repairs and sings and grows and donates. When the world is scary and broken, Mr. Rogers tells us to look for the helpers. We can extend that and resolve to BE a helper. Let's commit to do all we can be BE love for this world. In the process we come to know eternal life.

Third Sunday in Lent

Genesis 3:8-21; Romans 8:31-39

This is the third Sunday we’ve visited the story of beginnings in Genesis.  Today we read about the consequences of letting the serpent choose the dinner menu, better known as The Fall.  Last week we learned that the first humans disobeyed instructions and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which gave them the ability to know right from wrong.  This week we find them hiding in the garden so that God won’t find them and learn what they’ve done.  Their loss of innocence is noted here by their awareness of being without clothing and their attempt to remedy that problem.

Remember this story is an origin story and not a history.  Our ancestors told this and similar stories to explain why things were.  So rather than starting with an action and describing the consequences, they worked backwards from the consequences to the cause.  Given the way life is, what could have happened to explain this reality.  Today’s part of the story answers many questions.  Why does childbirth hurt?  Why is farming so hard?  Why are there snakes? The answer is that God is displeased with the behavior of the humans.  Some contemporary authors suggest that these stories explain the transition from cultures of hunter/gatherers into fixed settlements of farmers and herders.  That’s an interesting theory we’ll never be able to prove or disprove.  But it reminds us how very old these stories are and how very different life was when they were developed

If we were explaining these things today, we’d give a different answer.  We’d turn to obstetrics to describe the birth process, which involves pain because of the movement of muscles.  We’d ask a meteorologist and an agronomist to talk about the difficulties of farming in times of drought or flood.  We’d ask a herpetologist to tell us that snakes are wonderful creatures, not to be feared irrationally.  But ancient folks didn’t have the same resources we do so they did the best they could.  These are stories we can appreciate and enjoy as they help us reach into our ancient past.

It's interesting that although three religious traditions share these stories, only one sees it as a “Fall” from grace.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam share common stories but only Christianity sees this story as describing a fatal flaw in humanity, the reason why we aren’t and never can be perfect and so we are rejected by God.  In the first centuries of Christianity, philosophers used this story to explain why Jesus had to die – we were broken in Eden and Jesus fixed that.  But Jesus was a Jew and that’s not his understanding of what his ministry was about.  Yes, these stories describe the reality that human life is both beautiful and hard and people know good and bad and sometimes make wrong choices about that.  It seems to me that it’s possible to admit that reality and still not condemn humans for being human. 

The translator we’re using for our scripture this year points out an interesting fact – in this story the serpent is cursed (having to crawl on the earth and be hated by people) and the earth is cursed (resulting in weeds) but the people aren’t cursed.  Yes, their life is hard but the text doesn’t describe that reality as a curse.  It’s just the way it is.  Yet over the centuries we’ve come to believe that we’re cursed – doomed if you will – because of the behavior of original people.  If this story isn’t history, then neither is that understanding of our situation.  Maybe there’s a better way to understand what’s going on.

You laugh with me about how much I hate Lent and its themes.  This is the heart of why that’s true. Lent plays on the theme that we’ve been hopeless sinners since the moment we ate the fruit in the garden and God made life hard as a result.  We were supposed to be perfect but we’re not.  Since we can’t pull off perfect, we can’t save ourselves and “get right” with God.  So Jesus died to make up for our evil.  If we believe that, God will ignore our imperfection and let us into heaven anyway. There are just so many ways this seems wrong to me.

First of all, who says we were supposed to be perfect?  If I could, I’d eliminate that word from our vocabulary.  How much energy do people expend and how much pain do they experience because they can’t do everything perfectly – color in the lines, win the game, live in a relationship, look like a movie star, become rich and famous.  Day after day people do the best they can and feel like failures because the result isn’t perfect.  It’s time to give up that impossible, ridiculous standard.

Second, who says God is offended by ordinary successes and failures?  Life can be hard and sometimes we pull it off better than others.  But do our bad days really disappoint God?  Are they divine punishment for not getting everything right? Jesus says not.  He says God is Love and love doesn’t give up on anybody, even on the worst days.

Third, who says Jesus died in our place?  Well, actually, lots of people say that.  But Rome killed Jesus and Rome wasn’t at all interested in doing it for our sake.  Rome wanted to silence him because he was a trouble-maker, talking about love and mercy and economic justice and especially drawing a crowd.  Rome wanted to end the challenge to power that Jesus represented.  Instead they multiplied it infinitely.  They gave a rag-tag bunch of Jesus’ followers courage to continue to change the world

One of them, the Apostle Paul, was so bold as to completely defy the power of Rome.  Both Paul and Jesus lived when Rome made life terrible.  Taxes were crushing.  Official violence was pervasive.  People were enslaved physically and economically.  They were starving and oppressed.  Jesus says, “God loves you.  God is love.  Love one another.”  Not even Rome was stronger than the power of love.  Paul said, “Nothing can separate you from God’s love.  Not Rome, not danger, not the local governor, not enslavement, not death.  Nothing.”

It seems to me that neither Jesus nor Paul was saying, “You’re not perfect so Jesus will have to rescue you.”  They were saying, “Life is hard and sometimes unjust and terrible, but love is stronger than anything.  Love each other and together we’ll make it through.  God is always with us.”  The first idea takes away our power:  there’s nothing we can do to make life better.  The second idea gives us power:  nothing can defeat us if we live in love.

Our world is a pretty big mess right now.  Evil is destroying a beautiful country and an amazing people.  Only it’s not.  Because people are standing up with courage to fight it, and to welcome refugees and to feed strangers.  The world is far from perfect and some of it is terribly broken.  But even in the face of great danger love is finding a way.  Love is making us human in the face of dehumanizing attack.  In Ukraine.  In our own community.  In our workplaces and homes.  God hasn’t cursed us.  God loves us.  God hasn’t driven us away.  God is with us.  We aren’t powerless.  We have the power of love on our side and love will always find a way.

Second Sunday in Lent

Genesis 3:1-7 & Matthew 7:15-20

For our journey through Lent we’re starting with the second creation story (Genesis 2).  We’re taking it in small bites – three sermons instead of one – and today we bite off the bit about what gets eaten.  Traditionally, this is an apple, although that’s not identified here.  Interesting that although the apple features as the bad idea in the way we remember the story, we still believe that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Last week there were lots of word plays in the scripture and we begin this week with one.  We ended last week with the idea that the humans were naked and unashamed and we begin this week with the note that the serpent had “naked” intelligence.  Interesting that the same word is used for both.  We have been taught that the serpent is the bad guy in this because he’s crafty, but the word used to describe his intelligence isn’t a negative word.  

At issue this week is the matter of eating of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  God has instructed the humans not to eat its fruit, but there it is in the middle of the garden.  If it’s so bad, why is it there?  The simple answer is that this is an origin story, one that explains why things are, and the author needs it for the story to work.  But it seems odd that God would intentionally set humans up for failure at the very beginning of this human experiment.  We’re told that those who eat this fruit know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Over the centuries this story has been explained as testing humans’ ability to follow directions.  God says don’t eat it, so don’t.  Disobedience is bad and has disastrous consequences.  God says you’ll die.  The serpent says no, you won’t die, you’ll become like God (who knows the difference between good and evil).  Which one was right?  Interpreters have told us that this disobedience is the reason humans are mortal and eventually die, but there’s nothing in the story ahead of this action which says humans were immortal.  In fact we know we aren’t and never have been.

So what’s at stake in this story?  First of all it’s a very ancient story that shows us how people were trying to make sense of their world.  As such it functions more as a snapshot of what ancient people might have been thinking than as a definitive explanation for all times.  They were wondering why there is both good and bad in life and this is a way to explain that.

Second, let’s think about what it means to be able to make decisions about what’s good and what’s bad.  Humans begin life without that ability.  Infants and small children are innocent – a word we use to say they don’t have a framework for making choices about good and evil.  Hopefully they have only positive experiences (although that changes the minute they are first hungry or need a diaper change), and so they see the world through eyes which expect good.  Slowly, they learn that some things are acceptable and others not – they acquire the knowledge of good and evil.  It’s good to share your cookie with a friend and bad to run away from Dad in a parking lot.  The norms of culture and family shape a child’s understanding of morality, starting with simple rules and growing into complex issues.  Children who don’t develop this ability to understand right and wrong and make positive choices are diagnosed with personality disorders and become a menace to society.

So why would it be better for humanity not to develop this ability?  What happens if the humans remain innocent forever?  First of all, that simply wasn’t possible.  Simply by living they are going to encounter the joys and difficulties of life.  Second, the shaping of what we call civilization requires that people make choices about what’s good and what’s not.  We have to agree on the rules in order to live in community.  Yuval Noah Harari is a popular author whose books Sapiens and Homo Deus are rising on the best-seller lists.  They are books about how humanity evolved, particularly in our thought processes.  He suggests that stories like the one we consider today teach us that God is the one who establishes what’s right and what’s wrong and has the authority to tell us what to do based on that criterion.  We’re familiar with that idea – think the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule.  In Jesus’ day the Law was the criteria by which life was governed – the Jewish law or Torah for religious rules in his circle and Roman law in political circles.  People followed God by following the rules.

But it’s instructive to ask who benefited when people followed the law.  Surely the common folks weren’t getting much help from it.  Roman law was oppressive and violent.  Religious law was expensive and divided the people in power who could afford to follow it from the peasants who couldn’t.  If you were poor or enslaved, the law separated you from God.  Interesting that these stories are preserved and promoted by the folks who hold power and get to say what God wants.

Then let’s put Jesus’ teaching into this mix.  First Jesus simplifies the law by suggesting that it’s just Love – love God and love your neighbor.  Then in today’s reading he reminds folks that you can judge the quality of a person by watching what she or he does.  You will be known by the fruit you produce.  (Notice that centuries later, we’re still talking about fruit.)  People can be known as generous, kind, and just or they can be known as stingy, mean and self-serving.  You can tell by what they say and what they do.  It’s possible to follow the written law and be a bad person and to break the law and make the world a better place.  Everything is complicated and there aren’t always (or often) easy answers.  Because we know what’s good, we become responsible for how we use that knowledge and for what we choose to do.  

Responsibility for making choices is harder than just following rules.  The rule says “don’t kill.”  Tell that to a Ukrainian solder defending a city.  An old rule says “women should be quiet.”  We’ve decided as a community that rule isn’t useful and should be changed.  It’s hard for us a groups of people to work out what it means to live in community and care for each other.  But the effort is part of what makes us human and what allows us to evolve as a society. 

It seems to me that it’s not possible for humanity to exist without knowing good and bad – that some things work for good and others cause harm.  The suggestion that we could have been human without this is a pipe dream.  Humans know right and wrong as they experience life.  Whether or not this makes us “like God” depends on what we do about it.  If we define God as what is good, then when we use our knowledge for good, we are showing God’s image.  If we use it for ill, then everyone suffers, including ourselves.  Jesus assumes that we can tell the difference and encourages us to work together for those things that lift everyone up – food, clothing, shelter, dignity, compassion.  No matter what the story says, this is knowledge that we all have.  The question is, what will we do with it?  How will we form a community that blesses everyone?  What fruit will we bear individually and together?  And how will we know when we’re making progress?  

First Sunday in Lent

Genesis 2:7-25

Each year we try to find a special focus for Lent and this year we’re going to begin with one of the stories about creation in Genesis.  Our scripture today comes from the second chapter and is the second creation story in the Bible.  The first one is in chapter one and is actually the newer of the two stories.  (We know that because of the vocabulary differences and because it uses a new name for God than the second one.)  

 Both of these stories are “origin” stories – they tell us how things came to be the way they are.  They were probably written into what became Hebrew scripture when the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon.  Most of scripture has a long history of oral tradition and then becomes written when there is danger of it being lost or forgotten.  So some is written when the northern ten tribes are defeated by Syria in the 8th century BCE.  The creation stories are probably written when Jerusalem is conquered and most of the people exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE.  The first creation story shows significant influence of the creation myths of Babylon.  Other stories such as Daniel were written when Alexander the Great conquers Jerusalem in the second century BCE.  The Christian Gospels are written when it becomes clear that Jesus isn’t going to return before the original disciples die at the end of the first century CE.  Scripture is made of the stories that were so important to the identity of our spiritual ancestors that they went to great trouble to preserve them, writing them down so they would survive if the people themselves were overcome by disaster.  

One more note about the first story of creation before we leave it for another time and focus on the second…This story is the one with six days of creation and a seventh day of rest.  It’s the one that usually gets turned into children’s books with lovely art.  We know it as the one that starts out ‘in the beginning.”  But the first word of this story isn’t “in the beginning.”  The first word translates “while creating.”  While creating, God created the heavens and the earth.  It strikes me that this is a small but significant difference.  “In the beginning” has taught us through the years that the first thing ever God did was create our earth.  Everything else is subordinate to us – sun and moon to give us light, water and earth to give us live, all creatures to fill the earth with plenty and then as the piece de resistance the human to enjoy it all.  “While creating” implies that creation isn’t a moment in time – a beginning – but is a process.  “While creating” many amazing and wonderful things, God made the earth we know.  It’s a very different perspective and a bit humbling to think that all we know was just one small part of a vast creation.  Like when you pick up the dining room table on your way to do laundry.  It’s an important thing to do, but not the most important.  It’s good for us to be put in our place, perhaps.

But now on to the feature of the day – creation story two – which is quite different from the first with everything happening in reverse order.  This story presumes the existence of earth, filled with dust.  From that dust the first human is made.  Human from the humus our translation says.  That’s important because the Hebrew says “Adam” from “Adamah.”  It’s an intentional play on words.  (There are two more coming.)  This first human is made of the ground and lives when God fills its nostrils with air – wind/breath/spirit are again a play on words.  They are the word of being, just as now when someone stops breathing and their spirit leaves life stops and being is no more.  

Last Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 7:24-35

This scripture reading qualifies as confusing.  Surely much of its meaning has been lost over time and because we don’t read it in the same way first century folks heard it.  In the paragraph before today’s lesson we learn that John the Baptist has sent messengers to Jesus to ask if he’s the Messiah – the “one we’ve been waiting for.”  Jesus ignores the question for the afternoon while he heals people, feeds people and teaches about community.  Then he directs the messengers to go tell John what they’ve seen.  If this is what you are looking for, then I’m the one.

Today’s passage addresses the hierarchy of leadership.  John is a great prophet.  If Jesus is the Messiah, then he’s even greater.  Yet “the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” Jesus suggests that folks are attracted to John’s preaching and by inference to Jesus because they want to follow the “right” leader who is going to change the way the world works. They are waiting for God to send a Messiah to fix what’s broken about their time and place and they want to be sure they recognize the right person. Yet Jesus isn’t about replacing one top-down system with another.  He’s not about setting John or himself up to be the authority everyone follows.  He’s inviting people to join in what he calls “the kingdom of God” where everyone is equal and no one is greater than any other.

The translation we read suggests that those who accept this kingdom are those who accept God’s justice.  Those who don’t join are looking out for themselves.  But the movement isn’t about the leader, it’s about what is happening among the people.  For some, John is too ascetic and too odd.  For others, Jesus is too lax and accepting of outcasts.  No leader satisfies the crowd. Jesus says it’s because it’s not about the leader, it’s about the community they are invited to form.

Most of us were encouraged to adopt our religion because it’s the right one and to pay attention to the leaders – the local ones we know and the leadership of the tradition throughout history.  We learned to respect authority as telling us the right information about the way things are.  Jesus seems to be telling people to stop looking for answers to their problems in leaders or authorities and to form communities that work better for all.  Look at what’s happening, not at who’s doing it.  Figure it out for yourselves and don’t wait for the perfect leader to do it for you.  God’s wisdom and God’s justice lie in the collective wisdom of the group, not in the preacher.  Not in the authority of religion.

How would Jesus talk to us about this today?  Maybe he’d ask us to look for the kingdom of God among us.  It’s not about belonging to the right denomination or maybe even to the right religion.  It’s about practicing the justice of God in daily life.  We show our commitment to that when we talk about putting our faith into action and celebrate the way we’re light in our communities.  We do that when we wrestle with right and wrong in the world around us by asking about impacts on people’s lives.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve supported the effort in Grand Forks to pass a city ordinance opposing hate crimes.  We sent a letter on behalf of the church through the council and people have written individual letters of support.  For us that’s a justice issue.  No one should be harassed or discriminated against because of who they are, what they look like, or whom they love.  We stand up for friends and neighbors and for ourselves.  A hate crimes ordinance is important because it protects some folks from those who would do them harm.  It’s also important because of what it says about all of us – we will be a community that cares about everyone and respects all people.  When we do that life is better for all of us, not just a few folks in certain categories.  We stand up and say we will be a community without hate, with respect and justice.

Last week in the sermon that was lost to a blizzard I was going to talk about healing.  We want to be well and we want those we love to be well.  But we can’t just leave that to the medical professionals, saying “take care of us and don’t let anything bad happen.”  We have a responsibility as a community to work for health for everyone.  We do that by advocating for affordable health care.  We do that by adopting healthy practices – decaf coffee after church and healthy treat options.  We do that by acknowledging the many ways people are impacted by health – physical needs, mental health struggles and addiction.  The need for nutritious food and strong friendships and a community that supports each of us on good days and in hard times.  We create health for one another by creating a healthy environment for everyone.

This week we’ve been horrified by the war Russia started in the Ukraine.  We’re all struggling to know what’s the right way to respond.  From a distance we don’t have a way to make this go away.  Yet if we want to live in a world with peace, we have to stand up to violence no matter where it happens.  We can’t just ask our leaders to fix this.  We have to support their efforts.  If that means rising gas prices or disrupted supply chains, we cope.  We pray that this won’t become yet another war to end all wars and that our children won’t be endangered by fighting.  That doesn’t happen just by ignoring the news.  Already we are seeing protests around the world asking that the war stop as quickly as it started.  We can join our voices with those to clearly state that we want ALL people to live in peace.  We can add our ideas to the peacemakers’ and the strength of our community to the call for peace.

Jesus tells us that the least in the kingdom of God is greater than the leaders.  We have been invited into that kingdom.  We say “yes” not by waiting to be told what to do but by working every day to create the kingdom in our midst.  If we want justice, health, peace and love, then we must live justly, promote wellness and work for peace.  Each week we sing “Christ has no body now but yours.”  The kingdom of God is in our hands and it will be what we make of it.

Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany

Acts 8:36-42; Luke 7:11-17

Today we have two stories about healings from the first century.  I don’t know about you but stories of healings mystify and confuse me.  That’s not a great place to begin a sermon, so I invite you to think about these stories with me to see what helpful things we can discover.

First we can say that the ability to heal was common in biblical times.  The ancient prophets sometimes did miraculous healings.  Jesus did them.  He taught the disciples to do them.  And other itinerant preachers did healings.  They were one way to attract a crowd.  We also know that throughout history there have been skilled people who knew about herbs and their medicinal effects and others who practiced energy work like today’s reiki or healing touch and helped ease pain and cure illness.  So although our ancestors suffered from diseases that we now easily cure, they had some medical knowledge and skill available to them.

Healing stories are about more than just the physical action of being made well.  They are even about more than being able to resuscitate people who appeared to be dead.  They are an announcement that the person doing the healing has God’s power.  If life and death are in the hands of God, then the ability to prolong life and defer death is godly.  Healing stories about Jesus not only tell about this power but remind the people that in history it was prophets who healed.  They are a way of saying that Jesus is a great prophet, the Messiah they have been waiting for.  When we read through the book of Acts we read this story about Tabitha and learned that it and others like it were evidence that the disciples had the same power Jesus had and along with it the same authority.  So the stories are about something miraculous that happens and about someone with great importance.

There’s also a social statement buried in these healings.  When Peter is called to Tabitha’s death-bed, her friends show her all the clothing that she’s made for them and for the town’s widows who can’t afford to make their own clothing.  In our terminology we’d say that her mission is sewing and she’s doing God’s work by clothing people.  When Peter raises her from the dead, he affirms that work and gives God’s stamp of approval to it as well.  Jesus sees a funeral procession for a young man whose mother is mourning his death.  Of course that mourning is the sign of a mother’s love.  It’s also a reminder that widows had no means to support themselves and older adults, especially women, who were childless would soon be destitute.  So when Jesus raises the young man, he saves his mother from a desperate situation caused by the inequality of the times.  It reinforces his teaching that God intends for everyone to be cared for.

Throughout history people of faith have been involved in healing ministries.  Medieval monks created hospitals.  Islamic scholars did early medical research.  Christian missionaries built hospitals and clinics in the developed world and across the globe.  Mother Theresa gathered the dying poor in India and cared for them.  The Good News of Jesus has always included the capacity to care for those who were ill or dying.  That’s an important part of our heritage which we can celebrate.  Last week when we were talking about faith and science, we affirmed that medical knowledge and advances can be embraced as one way that God continues to care for us.  We are grateful for the skilled people who make up the medical community.

At the same time we are realistic about expecting miracles of healing.  Some illness is cured.  Some isn’t.  We want to be careful about saying that’s because God is choosing that some will live and others won’t.  My grandkids are praying for healing for their maternal grandpa who has a terminal illness.  I worry about how his eventual death will impact their trust in God.  So many times I hear folks saying that death is God’s will as if God’s picking a team for earth and another for heaven.  I just can’t believe that’s the way it works.  But I do believe that centuries of accumulated knowledge which make seemingly miraculous advances in our own lifetimes have a godly element to them.  We know so much more than our ancestors and we contribute to the advances generations will make after us. 

It's worth thinking a bit about what it means to be well.  In my own transplant experience I learned that it’s possible to be very ill and still completely well.  I’m not even sure that I can describe what that means to me.  It’s a peace that says whatever the outcome there’s no need to worry.   It’s a sense that when a body is ill the person is still whole.  The old hymn says, “It is well with my soul.”  That’s something we can affirm.

The Buddha’s search for meaning started as a way to address the suffering he saw in people around him.  He wanted a way to help people overcome suffering from illness or poverty or any of the hard parts of life.  After his own enlightenment he taught people that suffering is a choice.  You can’t choose your circumstances, but you can choose how you think about those circumstances.  You may not be able to choose if you are ill or well, but you can choose how you live each day in the midst of illness.  You can look for good, for compassion, and for moments of joy.  In all the ups and downs of life there are choices to be made for better or for worse.  Faith can help us learn how to make those choices for the best possible life.

As people of faith these stories invite us to be advocates for others.  Not only do we applaud modern health care, we work to be sure that everyone has access to that health care.  The availability of medical treatment shouldn’t be dependent on where you live or whether you can pay the price.  That’s why our denominations and our local church support efforts to expand health care for everyone in our nation and to make medicine available to people around the world.  We know personally that health isn’t just about bodies but also about minds and spirits.  Our advocacy needs to be for mental health, addiction treatment, overcoming abuse of all kinds, and all the ways people need help being well.  The people in our stories today were part of communities that cared for them and rejoiced with their healing.  Our church community also does all we can to support wellness for our friends and loved ones.  And we encourage wider communities – cities, states, nations – to place all kinds of wellness in the heart of how we treat one another.  It’s a way that God’s love and power is shown among us.

Evolution Sunday

Psalm 104 (selected verses) & Luke 7:11-17

Today is Evolution Sunday, a project of an organization called The Clergy Letter Project which began in 2004. In response to a Wisconsin school board's decision to dilute the teaching of evolution in science classes, statewide clergy wrote a letter supporting the partnership of faith and science. Eighteen years later over 17,000 clergy in six faith traditions world-wide have signed that letter and many of their congregations now celebrate on the weekend closest to Darwin's birthday each year. In 2021 a new letter in support of climate action has received more than 1,000 signatures and this year's celebration focuses on both climate and the pandemic experience we share. I've printed that new letter in this week's bulletin for you.

This project began to counteract the false idea that faith and science are at odds and that people of faith must reject science if it contradicts a literal understanding of sacred texts. That literal understanding in the United States was sparked by the writings of Darwin and others in the nineteenth century, suggesting that life on earth evolved over millions of years rather than being created fully formed in six days. Since then, some people have equated faith with believing the Bible stories as literal explanations of history and science, something they were never intended to be and were never understood to be in earlier days of Christianity.

We celebrate Evolution Sunday as a chance to clarify for ourselves and others how we see science and religion as partners in our contemporary world. This year Psalm 104 provides part of our scripture for reflection. The Psalm celebrates the goodness of creation as a gift from God. Three thousand years ago when the Psalm was written this was the common explanation of how the earth and its wonders came to be. Even now we look at the beauty of creation and the abundance of food Earth provides and see the hand of God. We use verses from this Psalm in our opening prayer each Sunday.

They speak of how amazing this planet is and how grateful we are for its bounty.  It's not necessary for us to accept these words as a literal explanation of how the earth was made in order to see God's presence in creation. In fact, as we learn more about the complex processes of Earth's development over billions of years, we are even more amazed that so many minute happenings coalesced to make such a magnificent place. Our home in this universe is amazing and it speaks to us of the presence of something greater and more wonderful than we can imagine - God. The capacity to be amazed may be one of the starting points of religion and faith.

Today 's reading from the Gospel of Luke is one of the foundational scriptures in our understanding of Jesus and his ministry. Jesus is preaching in his home synagogue, reading from the prophecy of Isaiah and suggesting that the prophecy was being fulfilled in that moment. The poor hear good news; the blind see; the oppressed are set free; God is visible in the midst of the people. His neighbors questioned him, asking for the miracles that were rumored from other places. "If you're so great, Jesus, show us the signs!" But Jesus doesn't do miracles at home, suggesting that they weren't able to see them. Maybe that's because these folks weren't in a mind to be amazed by Jesus.

After all, he was Joe and Mary's boy who grew up down the street and played with their kids when he was younger. He took over the family business when his father died and worked with them on building projects in nearby Sephoris. Then he abandoned his mother and took off to follow that radical John the Baptist and came home spouting strange and dangerous things about raising up poor people and healing beggars. They saw what they had always seen and consequently they couldn't see new things - healing illness of body or of community. They couldn't change what they had always believed to receive something new and better.

I wonder if the perceived conflict between science and faith in our own time is caused by the inability of people to see something new and be amazed by it. In Jesus' day his teaching was radical and challenged the status quo. Over time it's become settled as tradition. In his time it was quite new. In our time it can be used to prevent change.

Science tells us that creatures and systems that aren't evolving - or changing - are dying. The same can be true of religions, any religions. Unless we are changing in response to new situations and circumstances, including new scientific knowledge, we're dying. We lose our capacity to be amazed and our capacity to grow.

Our sacred texts inform our understanding of our world, but they were written in a time when the world was quite different, and people understood it differently. They are an accurate reflection of the time they describe, but their contemporary truth is in the underlying meaning and not in the details. The stories of creation in scripture don't include contemporary scientific understanding because that wasn't part of the knowledge of their time. But we can make space for their conviction that there is a greater power at work at the same time we learn about how that power worked over time through intricate scientific processes. This knowledge isn't mutually exclusive.

My very Catholic granddaughter told me a joke this week: How does a scientist answer a question he doesn't understand? Become a Catholic and when he gets to heaven, he can ask God to explain it! (She thought that was very clever.) I suggested she could use her God-given mind and do experiments to find the answer. Just because contemporary scientific evidence gives us answers that weren't known thousands of years ago doesn't mean they aren't right or that God isn't in them. We can believe in both God and science, and we can change and adapt to continue the holy work of creation - preserving the earth and making its benefits available to all creatures.

This Evolution Sunday we're asked to think about Climate Action. Science agrees that the earth is in trouble because of pollution caused by our current use of fossil fuels and over-exploitation of natural resources. Al Gore called that "an inconvenient truth" because it challenges our current lifestyle. Our faith makes it clear that we are stewards of these resources and of the earth. We can't ignore the harm society is inflicting on Earth and be good stewards. Jesus calls us to be advocates for justice. We can't ignore the injustice that people with less advantage pay the highest price for this harm. Rather than denying the need for climate action, faith leads us to engage in change which benefits our own and future generations.

We're also asked to connect this Sunday with the pandemic that has changed our lives for two years now. Science has.given us ways to address this illness and reduce infection and death. Scientists developed vaccines in record time and are just as quick in finding treatments that improve recovery. They have given us guidelines for masking and distancing and updated those as they learned more. Some are resisting this help on religious grounds. But religion which rejects science when science saves lives looks a lot more like politics than faith. We are indeed our neighbor's keeper, and we love our neighbor best by using all tools available to prevent disease and promote  health.  Might I suggest that the amazing advances made in such a short time show the presence of God among us?  Isn't it more faithful to accept new knowledge and adapt to new realities than to say "no" to simple measures which save lives?

Our religious ancestors saw God in their time and place and tried to live by the values they believed were godly. Our time and place are much different and scientific knowledge is a big part of that difference. We don't honor faith by refusing to evolve with these new realities. We don't honor God by freezing God in the first century. We can trust God to be just as present in our time and place and live by the values which are timeless. We apply those values to our new knowledge and our new circumstances by asking that they preserve the planet, improve the lives of all people and all creatures, and do no harm. And we give thanks for good brains and kind hearts that use science to continue the creation of the amazing world.

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

John 2:1-11

Our Justice Conversation group uses Sojourners magazine as a thought starter for our meetings. Last month we were introduced to A Women’s Lectionary by Wilda Gafney through that magazine. A lectionary is a schedule of scriptures for worship, and this book chooses scriptures which include women, not because women are more important than men but because the stories in which women appear are often overlooked in traditional selections. So for a while we’re going to let this book guide us to some interesting stories for our consideration.

Today’s story is about the wedding in Cana. Jesus and his mother are there, maybe even his whole family. They must have some connection to the host because when the wine runs out Jesus’ mother wants to help avoid the embarrassment of not having enough for the celebration. We see a bit of Jesus humanity, including his irritation that his mother wants him to fix this situation. She is in effect forcing his hand at showing publicly what he’s able to do. In spite of his rebuke to her he goes ahead and turns six large jars of water into wine, even better wine that the host originally supplied. Ever since, we’ve been referring to this miracle at parties around the globe.

The author of John’s gospel tells us that this is the first sign Jesus performed in his ministry and because of it people believed him. We need to put the story in the context of John’s gospel, often called the “signs” gospel. Rather than following the same timeline of the first three gospels (Matthew/Mark/Luke) John strikes out on his own to tell the story of Jesus. He does so by moving through a series of miracle stories, each one being a sign of Jesus’ power. His purpose is to prove that Jesus is God’s Son by reminding people of all the amazing things he was able to accomplish. John wants us to believe in Jesus and these stories make his case.

We can connect what John is doing to our own practice of naming “light signs” each Sunday. What we are about in the world is the “sign” of our faith. We hope it’s persuasive to others and they might want to join in on the fun we’re having making a difference in the world.

In Sunday School we may have learned these stories as historical, the very signs John wants us to see and be amazed. It’s more accurate to take these stories as metaphor. John’s gospel was probably the last to be written, a full two generations after Jesus’ life and ministry. It tells stories not known to the other gospel writers, which makes it likely that John has at least embellished them significantly if not invented them completely. But they are still “true” stories in showing us who John believed Jesus to be. If they are indeed signs leading to faith, we can ask ourselves, “What are they a sign of?” It's safe to say that this story isn’t a sign of Jesus advocating for excessive drinking of wine, even though he made such an abundant quantity. This story can be problematic for the many folks among us who need to avoid wine for health reasons or who struggle with addiction. Our own church has stopped using wine in communion so that no one needs to hesitate to participate. We use only grape juice. Wine was the common drink in Jesus’ day, being healthier than untreated water in many circumstances. This story is about running out of beverages, not about promoting alcohol. I love the fact that Jesus and his mother were attending a wedding together of family friends and that some of the early disciples were there with him. Jesus’ ministry emerges out of his life, his real life. He introduces the men who are gathering around him to his family. They go to celebrate with friends, maybe friends they had in common. Jesus isn’t dropped into the world as a holy being, different from others. He’s a man with a God-sized vision who lived in a particular time and place and was part of that culture and history. He was real. That’s one of the signs we see in this tale.

It’;s important that they are at a wedding, a time of great celebration. He makes the party better. He participates in the joy everyone is feeling. This story is a sign of the joy that was part of being with Jesus. Sometimes the meaning of Jesus’ life and ministry seems heavy with significance. John is reminding us that it began in joy.

So what are the signs of joy that come with being a follower of Jesus? Let’s start with LOVE, a good place to start at a wedding. Jesus often spoke about love: love God, love your neighbor, God is love. It’s easy as his followers to get bogged down with what we need to do or to believe. Those or good things, but they start with the simple fact that we are loved. God loves us. God IS love. Before anything else, we can remember that we are loved and valued for who we are. We can’t hear that message too much. You are God’s beloved.

There’s a second sign of joy in the gathering of this community. So many folks came to the wedding and stayed so long that they ran out of wine. They were having a good time together. Jesus’ new disciples came to the party. His whole family was there. Being a follower of Jesus has the perk of getting to be together with great people. Today after worship we’re going to have a potluck and celebrate the past year. Before that we’re going to gather at Jesus’ table and remember that it all starts with his love. It’s a good thing.

Finally, there’s a sign of joy in helping people. Jesus rescued his host from embarrassment. Our own signs of light reach out to folks we know and those we don’t. When you are filled with the joy of God’s love, you shine your light in the world. Not because you have to but because you want to. It’s what comes naturally to people who are loved and who are happy about it.

The greatest sign of joy and love is making a difference in the world.

That’s what we do. That’s what Jesus does with us.

Third Sunday after the Epiphany

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

In my Grand Forks family we coordinate our calendars by birthdays.  We try to get together to celebrate each person’s birthday, and at that party we plan…when is the next birthday?  How long until we can have a party again?  Will we see each other in between?

In the church our calendar is strung like lights along the string of Holy Days.  There are the big ones: Advent/Christmas/Epiphany, Lent/Easter, Pentecost.  And enough little ones between to keep us moving along:  Baptism of Christ, Transfiguration, Trinity, Reign of Christ.  January is a “between time” after Christmas and before Lent.  In our frozen part of the world, it feels like “in between” as we all hunker down in warm places and minimize the times we have to venture out.  Add Covid to the mix and more and more of us are isolating at home and maybe feeling lonely.

It's a gift that this year the cold between is filled with the scripture from 1 Corinthians that tells us we all matter and we’re all connected to each other.  Nell and Neil have done a great job of helping us step into these scriptures and hear their messages with new ears.  Today we take one more step and remember how interconnected we all are.

Paul uses the image of the human body to talk about community.  The body has many parts, just like any group of people – a family, a workplace, a school, a church.  It takes ears and eyes and noses and hands to make everything work well.  It takes cheeks for kissing and other cheeks for sitting.  Paul reminds us that each one is essential, even if some are better known or more visible.   Some of us have parts missing (spleen, gall bladder, appendix, thyroid).  When something is missing, the rest of the body has to compensate for that.  When some skill is missing in a community, we all have to compensate.

In our little church we’ve learned not to try to fit the parts into some ideal called “church.”  We don’t have enough parts to do everything that much larger churches do.  Instead we fit “church” into the pieces we have.  We build what we do on the skills and the interests of the folks who are here.  We have cooks, so we cook.  We have sewers and crafters, so we crochet blankets and make quilts.  We have musicians, so we enjoy their music.  We have handy-folk, so we do some of our repair work.  We don’t have many kids on Sundays, so we have kids programs on Wednesdays when they can come.  What we don’t have, we do without.  That doesn’t make us less of a church than those who have more people.  It makes us the just-right church for this group of people.

When new opportunities come our way, we ask: can we do that?  Do we want to do that?  If the answer is yes, we take it on.  We’re now expert food-box-fillers.  If the answer is no, we leave it for someone else. Right now we don’t have a youth group or a men’s or women’s group. I hope we don’t feel bad about that. It’s just not our time for it.

Our scripture asks us to value every single part of what’s here.  I hope you experience that value we hold for you.  Each and every person is a blessing, regardless of age – young or old, or the time you have to give, or the number of times you sign the clipboard.

Just being you makes us better.
Thank you for who you are.

Because we are such nice folks, it’s pretty easy for us to appreciate our church family.  I suspect Paul would challenge us to expand our circle a bit.  In our wider community or even our country or our world, I don’t have much trouble valuing nice folks who do nice things.  But if it’s true that we’re all interconnected, then our community also depends on those who push our buttons or make life harder.  That’s more difficult for me to get my head around.

Paul is talking about how each part builds up community, but what about those parts which seem to break community?  How do we think about them?

This week I’m pretty irritated by those who voted against voting rights in the Senate.  That’s an issue I care about.  You probably have a list of things you wish our representatives or other parts of government would do something about.  The price of prescription drugs, child tax credit, inflation…you can fill in what matters to you. How do we value those who keep what we want to do from happening?  First, we value them for who they are and not for what they do.  They are important because they exist.  They are children of God and God loves them.  Second, they can inspire us to work harder and louder in support of those things we think would help everyone. 

In our town there’s a controversy about UND’s new policy of inclusion.  They say everyone will be respected and those who want new names or pronouns to celebrate a new identity will get them.  The Catholic church in our area is encouraging students to boycott UND.  Our council is going to write a letter on our behalf to thank UND for stepping up to this plate and making their community more just and respectful.  The noise about this issue gives us the change to clarify what we value and to do something about it.

In our world we’re watching as Russia threatens Ukraine.  We all hope there won’t be a war over that border.  The soldiers on all sides hope the same.  The situation gives us a change to support our leaders who are working for peace.  And it gives us a chance to reflect on places where our own country might be supporting aggression:  Yemen, Syria, our own borders.  Those who cause trouble give us the opportunity to act is ways to control aggression and work for peace.

We could list more examples of situations or people who seem wrong to us.  We believe we are called to do something about those situations.  To stand up for peace and justice.  To encourage the systems we live within to be more equitable and to support opportunities for everyone.  We start by valuing ALL the people involved.  By realizing that we are all part of one whole – not them vs us but all of us together.  When we value even the difficult parts as beloved and necessary, then we can engage in respectful dialogue. We can talk to one another about what matters to us.  Maybe we can reach a new consensus. 

Even if we need to say no, to impose consequences for bad behavior or make certain actions illegal, we still need to approach that with love and respect.  The banner Victoria made for us says “Hate has no home here.”  That’s true when we are working to overcome the hate expressed by others.  It’s also true when we think of our own attitude toward those we see as causing harm.   We may well need to stand up to injustice and prevent damage to others.  But we do it with love.  We do it recognizing that we are always connected to each person.  We do it in a way that heals community and mends the brokenness for everyone.